The Best Concerts of 2024

This unfortunately postponed tour is a key element of Donald Glover’s self-proclaimed “final” project from his Childish Gambino persona and involves his latest album, the excellent “Bando Stone and the New World,” a forthcoming film of the same name and, possibly most elaborate of all, this “New World Tour.” Designed by Tobias Rylander (Beyonce, the 1975), the technology for the show is truly next-level: there were two stages and two tall vertical lighting towers on either end of the arena, as well as big cube-shaped video screens on either side of the stage and a long walkway leading out into the audience; there was also a more conventional horizontal lighting rig and banks of laser lights that could pierce the air individually or shoot from one tower to another, forming perpendicular curtains of light. Most dazzling of all, above the end of the walkway was a sort of giant crystal cloud comprised of a couple hundred icicle-like rods that lit up in synchronized sequences — and even featured a giant mosaic-like video of Glover’s face — and rose and descended throughout the show. The audience was warned, by both a voiceover and later, Glover himself, not to look directly into the lasers or ultra-bright lights. At the center, of course, was Glover, who has the talent, magnetism and catalog to remain the focus of a show like that. The setlist was oddly, and intentionally, lopsided: The first half of the show consisted mostly of multi-genre songs from the new album, along with a couple from his 2020 outing “Atavista,” while the second half was basically the opposite, heavy on hip-hop tracks dating back to his early 2010s mixtapes and EPs for the “real fans.” The show ended, of course, with a roll through his sumptuous 2016 R&B slowjam “Redbone,” before wrapping with the new album’s “Lithonia” — and like SZA’s recent tour, the show ended with credits rolling on the video screen. —Jem Aswad